Aleksandra Stone's Fruits of Labor

Aleksandra Stone
​
Fruits of Labor
photographs, masks & other objects

Oct. 5  - Nov. 30

Reception with the artist Friday, Oct. 5, 6-9 p.m.

Part-time Louisvillian Aleksandra Stone returns to garner narrative for her third solo show. Stone spent this past summer as an Artist in Residence on Governors Island, NY. 

Stone’s intent for Fruits of Labor is emancipation but on certain terms.

I grappled with how I might photograph my body in ways that combat undesirable relegation to object, how I might emancipate my body from cultural inscriptions.

In the era of pink pussyhats and #metoo, Stone’s vagina mask is no political irony or identification. Her images might bring to mind Judy Chicago’s Womanhouse and subsequent projects, but this work is of 2018 and the shift in the territory she considers is that of misogyny to femmephobia. Stone’s self-effacements in baroque productions of consumable, anonymous hyperfemininity converge into diary and portraiture, portraits that could be of no one else but Stone.

As is sometimes the case, a single portrait can be the culmination of years of consolidated work… my work has sought to address how a body marked by trauma, a body engraved from birth with deeply symbolic cultural connotations, moves through space with an autonomous agency.

Stone is too realistic to imagine that her vagina and doll masks, her still lives of self as fruit and flowers, make for any simple healing or liberation. Her goal, she says, is to explore the simultaneity of a life as an object and a subject, and see what new shapes may come of it. Stone seems to consider and reject the fantasy of flight from this dilemma (Blue Bird).

Over time, the contorted shapes I assumed in my portraits became a temporary answer to the quandary of objectification; the shapes thus became a symbol of resistance. Nevertheless, in failing to consider the origins of these shapes and the extreme violence that begot them, I unknowingly created a body of work that memorialized a history of oppression.

And yet. Healing and wholeness come through exploration and acceptance, even by embracing destructive or vilified qualities found within. Even when this project is grievously complicated because those same toxic qualities within are hyper valued without.

Personal stories — especially from artists— may not be a purging but a meticulous witnessing, the result of which is to fashion a new self. The characteristic emotion of such self-witnessing is often ambivalence and the intensity of this is something to see.

Aleksandra Stone C.V. https://goo.gl/CviXPC